Over the last decade or so, addressing financial instability has become a policy priority. Despite the efforts made, policymakers are still a long way from developing a satisfactory operational framework. A major challenge complicating this task is the "fuzziness" with which financial...

The unfolding financial turmoil in mature economies has prompted the official and private sectors to reconsider policies, business models and risk management practices. Regardless of its future evolution, it already threatens to become one of the defining economic moments of the 21st century....

We show empirically that survey-based measures of expected inflation are significant and strong predictors of future aggregate stock returns in several industrialized countries both in-sample and out-of-sample. By empirically discriminatingbetween competing sources of this return predictability...

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteenGerman states (Länder) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of acapital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed incomemarket for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals that...

We analyse questions of arbitrage in financial markets in which asset prices change in time as stationary stochastic processes. The main focus of the paper is on a model where the price vectors are independent and identically distributed. In the framework of this model, we find conditions that...

This paper analyzes the effects that uncertainty about economic fundamentalshas on aggregate trading volume. First, the trading volume of an investor facinga standard consumption portfolio choice problem is derived. It is found that if theparameters describing the investment opportunity set...

Theories of investment suggest that the option value of waiting to invest is significant in many branches of economics, where investment is irreversible. The existing literature has generally failed to account for the general equilibrium feedback effects of lumpy investments on optimal...

We use data on actual holding periods for all investors in a stock market over a10-year period to investigate the links between holding periods, liquidity, and assetreturns. Microstructure measures of liquidity are shown to be important determinantsof the holding period decision of individual...

The Sharpe ratio is adequate for evaluating investment funds when the returns ofthose funds are normally distributed and the investor intends to place all his risky assetsinto just one investment fund. Hedge fund returns differ significantly from anormal distribution. For this reason, other...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method from the area of operationsresearch that measures the relationship of produced outputs to assignedinputs and determines an efficiency score. This efficiency score can be interpretedas a performance measure in investment analysis. Recent...